My reflections this week come from the confluence of three sources: I have been reading Henri Nouwen's book, The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom, we read and discussed Elie Wiesel's book, Night, in our book club, and I prepared a talk on C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. Nouwen's work is a collection of reflections he wrote as he was recovering from a spiritual/emotional breakdown. Wiesel's book is the account of his time in the Nazi concentration camps. Most of us are probably familiar with Lewis' series, at least from seeing commercials for the movie, if not having read the books themselves.

Nouwen reflects a lot on God's unconditional love for us, and the way in which we need to find that place within ourselves where we connect to that love in order to not look for that fulfillment from other human beings. He recognizes that when other people touch us in that place which is most vulnerable, it can awaken a tremendous need within us, but that if we do not see that need as the need for God, if we try to have that person who touched us so deeply fulfill that need within us, we will inevitably be hurt. He also reflects that once we do find our security in that experience of trusting the most vulnerable part of ourselves to God, we are free to love others without expecting to receive love from them in return. He does maintain that we have a need for human love as well as for God's love and that God intends to bring people into our lives to fulfill that need, but those people may not be the same people to whom we give our love. The only problem I have with Nouwen's reflections is that sometimes it seems that when we trust that most vulnerable piece of ourselves to God, we experience being hurt or let down by God. Regardless if that is not really the case in the grand scheme of things, that is our experience. We don't understand why things turn out the way that they do.

Reading Wiesel's account of the concentration camps, one cannot help but ask with him, "Where was God?" How could God have let such a thing happen? Granted there was tremendous evil at work, and humans were ultimately culpable both for directly perpetrating the evil that took place as well as for being complacent with its occurrence even when they were not directly involved. I also do believe that God was working in those who risked their lives to save others during that time, but that still doesn't answer why God did not intervene in some direct way to stop what was occurring. It raises many theological questions for us about whether and how God intervenes, to which there are very few satisfactory answers.

That brings me to Narnia. In Narnia the children ask if Aslan (the Lion who is the God/Christ figure in the story) is safe. Mr. Beaver responds, "Of course he isn't safe. But he is good." One of the articles I was reading related this statement to Lewis' own experience of God. Lewis' mother died when he was a child. His father was unable to overcome his own grief enough to be any source of comfort and love to his grieving children. The children were sent to boarding schools where the experience was abusive to the extent that Lewis calls that chapter in his autobiography, "Concentration Camp." The author of the article I read reflected that Lewis' own experience of God led him to the conclusion that God is not safe. God does not protect us from bad things happening to us. God is also not tame for Lewis. As the children cannot control Aslan, we cannot control God. We can pray for help; we do pray for help, but we cannot make God do what we want. In the movie Shadowlands, which is about C.S. Lewis losing his wife to cancer, Lewis' character states, "I do not pray because it changes God; I pray because it changes me. I pray because the need flows out of me constantly."

This is the paradox of our faith. Bad things do happen to us. We do not understand. We do not know why God does not intervene to stop these things from happening. We may even feel betrayed and hurt by God, finding it hard to trust God again. But ultimately we also experience God as the only one we can turn to at such times, the one who is there with us, crucified on the cross of suffering. The one who is with us in our cry, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" And in that experience we pray that we can come again to the place where we feel God's unconditional love for us, the place where God, who "is not safe" paradoxically becomes our place of safety, our home.